1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a toilet bar suitable for moisturizing and cleansing the human body, such as the skin and hair. In particular, it relates to a toilet bar composition that is mild to the skin and which also has a creamy lather.
2. The Related Art
Combination toilet bars are well known. However, the majority of them are very irritating to the skin due to the fact that they are soap based, have low levels of moisturizers, or some combination thereof. Many prior art combination bars have been produced by using a co-surfactant along with some amount of free fatty acid to achieve a certain degree of mildness. The milder co-surfactants typically used along with the fatty acids provide a milder bar with creamy lather. Such co-surfactants typically used in combination bars are mainly sodium cocoyl isethionate, alfa olefin sulfonate, sodium lauryl sulfate or a similar type of synthetic surface active agent(s). The fatty acids often used as superfatting agents are mainly coco fatty acids or stearic/palmitic fatty acids. The fatty acids in combination bars or even superfatted bars have traditionally been used to generate the delta phase for improvement in lather and mush properties. In superfatted bars, the superfatting agents that have proven especially effective are low titer fatty acids which although not wishing to be bound by this theory, are believed to form the delta phase by their interaction with stearate/palmitate soaps.
It has been surprisingly found that a specific surfactant blend can be used as a co-surfactant along with a superfating mixture of both low and high titer fatty components in the inventive combination bar. At least one of the components of the co-surfactant mix is an amphoteric surfactant(s). The ratio of the non soap (synthetic) anionic to amphoteric surfactants can vary from 1:5 to 5:1 and the preferred total level of the cosurfactants is from 2–5%. The preferred anionic surfactant is selected from the group of C8–18 alkyl sulfo methyl ester or any of the C8–18 alkyl sulfate or sulfonate group of surfactants. Further, surprisingly it has been found that a mixture of emollients that are a combination of two or more of C8–18 alkyl fatty acids, fatty esters, fatty alcohols, triglycerides or hydrocarbons is more effective especially when a hydrocarbon with a titer less than 50 C is employed. In this case some of the fatty acid components can have titer as high as 70–80 C while the other emollient components can be having titer as low as 1–2 C.